Radical Picasso

While the personality cult of Pablo Picasso still holds sway over his popular reputation, the force of his work has fallen into disuse. In this groundbreaking and ambitious study, C. F. B. Miller uses that force to undo and remake our understanding of the twentieth century's most legendary artist. By critiquing this legend and showing how, even now, the art itself disrupts received ideas, Radical Picasso rethinks Picasso's function in the history of modernism.
Presenting a fresh account of cubism as an art of negativity and excess, Miller juxtaposes early cubist painting with G. W. F. Hegel, high cubism with Plato and his critics, and "synthetic" cubism with Walter Benjamin. The "guitar" assemblages of 1926 radicalize collage, taking up the racialized and gendered remainders of modernist aesthetics. Next to surrealism, Picasso's sexuality becomes a biopolitical problem,